Newsflash: Battered Bitcoin Price Sets New Yearly Low at $3,310

So much for that early week recovery. The bitcoin price touched a fresh yearly low on Friday morning, driving the crypto market even further into the red as financial markets across the board continued their recent downtrend.

Bitcoin had entered the day on shaky footing, with many fearing that the flagship cryptocurrency’s inability to defend the $4,000 level signaled an impending drop to the $3,000 region. BTC/USD has not broken that next crucial level yet, but the bitcoin price did take a major step toward that level on Friday morning at around 1:25 UTC, when BTC dove to a new yearly low at $3,311 after trading as high as $3,849 less than 24 hours prior. As of the time of writing, BTC/USD was hovering near $3,344 on Coinbase, representing a single-day decline of just under 10 percent.

BTC/USD | Coinbase

The move to a fresh low-water mark in 2018 followed the Securities and Exchange Commission’s decision to delay ruling on VanEck’s latest bitcoin ETF proposal until February 2019. However, nearly everyone expected that the commission would kick the can down the road until the last minute, as it has done with other crypto ETF applications in the past. Consequently, it seems unlikely that the delay would have any real impact on bitcoin’s short-term movements.

In any case, the technicals continue to look poor for the crypto market, with some analysts – including Bloomberg’s Mike McGlone – predicting that a mark as low as $1,500 would not be out of the question for the already-battered bitcoin price.